Jay gently rocked Clover in his arms as Mal flitted around the nursery like a lost moth, inspecting every inch of the room. Logically, she knew that there was nothing to find, that she and two of his three children had survived into adulthood while living in this nursery, but she still double- and triple-checked every corner. With Dominik waiting in the other room, she could find no logical or extreme end to her paranoia — not when her hand constantly dipped into her satchel to ensure that her camera was still hidden inside, not when she suspected that Jay would throw it out if left to his own devices.
She picked up a decorative jar of coloured glass. As a child she had loved it — as a mother, it felt too heavy and unstable to be in a nursery. “Maybe this could move into another room?”
“Mal, I promise that everything is as safe as it can be.” Clover drowsily whined, prompting him to start humming again.
She grimaced and set the jar down, as far away from the dresser's edge as possible. “There’s enough milk for the next three days,” she told him, though she’d mentioned it at least twice already. “She has to nap after lunch, or else she won’t sleep through the night — and she gets cranky in the morning if she doesn’t get to eat right away.”
“Now who does that remind me of?” She turned to glower at him. He grinned back unrepentantly before turning solemn. “What if you’re held up?”
Even the thought made her snap defensively, “I won’t be.”
“I’m not saying you will.” Clover was nearly asleep, her eyes half-shut as she clung to his shirt. “But if I run out of milk before you get back, am I allowed to use powdered formula?”
She didn’t like it, but the alternative was finding someone who was nursing, and she liked that even less. “Fine. Whatever you need to do.”
“Solid food?”
“Stick with formula, but— but if there’s nothing left, solid food would be fine.” She’d be back before that was even a notion, but her fingernails cut painful little marks into her palms regardless. “I’ll be back by tomorrow morning. Noon, at the latest.”
“You’ll do your best,” he assured her, blissfully unaware that he was only making her anxious heartburn worse. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but it won’t hurt either of you to get a little break. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
“Mm.” Her adventure across the bay hadn't inoculated her against the sting of leaving; it still felt like prying her heart from her chest and leaving it on the mantle. “I’ve kept Dominik waiting long enough — unless you think I should stay. Just until she falls asleep.”
“She’s almost there. I’ve got it covered.”
“Okay.” It’s not okay, why are you walking away from your baby, why are you leaving her behind— “Okay. Time to go.” Her feet were stuck to the floor, as though they'd been nailed there.
“Time to go,” he echoed. “I promise that she’ll be right here when you get back — and she’ll be so happy to see you.”
She smiled grimly, squaring her shoulders and steeling herself to leave, one hand raising to grasp the ice-cold doorknob. Her hand rested there for a moment too long, and she turned back to Jay and Clover, the words tripping out of her mouth, “You know what to do, if something happens to me?”
“You’re going to Borough Park — nothing’s going to happen.”
“But if something does happen, if I fall in the bay or step on a nail, you know what to do?”
“Send someone to the tower in Lehigh,” he recited. “Have them contact River of the Turtle Clan and Wren of the Wolf Clan, in Akwesasne. No one else is to be trusted with Clover.”
***
When Dominik finally spoke, she almost didn’t hear his quiet voice; she was too busy staring at the four-pointed scar on his forearm, the same age as Willow's, and wondering how Tai-Song coped with the both of them going into battle every day.
“Willow probably hasn’t said so, but we appreciate you doing this.”
“Well, I haven’t found him yet.” She tore her attention from his scar and raised her camera to her eye, mocking up the photos she couldn’t waste her film on as they walked to the northern bridge. All the façades and cracks in the pavement and studies of distance and focus were so tempting; were all other problems solved first, her greatest wish was to have an endless supply of raw film. She swung her camera to Dominik, zooming in on the painted dots on the nosepiece of his mask, the top half white and the bottom red. “Any theories for what he was trying to do?”
He snorted and good-naturedly pushed the lens away from his face. “Probably stealing gold, or platinum — he once told me that you can use that stuff as a conductor.”
She didn’t know enough about electronics to confirm or refute it, but precious metals were about as easy to come by as a new pair of lungs — not even the denizens of Midtown had the wealth for it. She stumbled briefly on the lip of a many-feet-deep pothole, arms pinwheeling for a moment before Dominik pulled her back from the ledge. The eight children packed inside tittered at her miss-step, until one gasped and scrambled up to eagerly point at her camera. “Miss, miss, what’s that?”
She was about to kneel down and show it off when Dominik cleared his throat, nodding to a group of fathers sitting nearby and watching them with suspicion. She tucked her camera away and shooed the kids back to their game. “So, tell me everything that I’ve missed.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and lifted his shoulders against the breeze as they trudged on. “Midtown mostly left us alone after we took out the war drones. Niña finishing ahead of schedule set them off again: right before it went online, they started pushing us back from the coasts.”
“What about you three? Any big milestones?”
He shrugged tiredly. “I was thinking about ending things, with the both of them.”
She couldn’t hide her surprise. “Really?”
“Really. I wanted to talk about it last year, but then Tai-Song started acting weird, and I could never get him to hold still long enough to talk about it, and now he’s gone and fucked off.” He sighed, rubbing his forehead. “Willow's starting to pick up on it. I don’t think it’d break his heart if I left, but it deserves a face-to-face conversation with all three of us.”
“You don’t owe him that. You don’t have to waste your time waiting.”
“It’s my time to waste.” He looked down at her, tired eyes eager for a change of topic. “So, when do we get to meet your beau?”
“You've already met her.” She could already tell where this topic was going, and she was in no hurry to get to its crux.
“Yeah, yeah, the kid’s the love of your life. I didn’t see your partner around, though — were they out, or something?”
“It’s just me. She’s a donor baby.”
“Oh.” He didn’t have to sound so disappointed. “Is it tough, doing that?”
“In some ways, but babies aren’t exactly a walk in the park in any case. I was a little worried that it’d hurt my friendship with Kaia, but asking them to be a donor was probably the simplest thing I’ve ever done.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not!” The three months she had spent psyching herself up to ask didn’t count. “They made things complicated, not me. ‘Oh, Mal, what if you fall in love with me? What if you change your mind about custody? What if the baby hates me?’” She swatted a biting fly from her arm. “They really cared about that last one, for some reason.”
“And?”
“I’ve yet to fall in love with them — and I assure you, the process of inseminating myself with a turkey baster was very romantic. I’ve never once thought of making them step up, and Clover loves them so much that it’s embarrassing.” So much talk of what she left behind was depressing her, and she was glad to turn more attention to crossing the bridge safely, climbing over a crumbling highway divider to walk over to the intact sidewalk. Dominik was practising old habits, sticking directly behind her to avoid seeing the drop through the boulder-sized holes in the concrete. “Still afraid of heights?”
“It’s a perfectly reasonable fear to have.”
She veered toward the edge, ignoring his gasp as she looked down to the underpass, feeling the butterflies erupt in her stomach — she had never really been afraid of heights, not even after hearing the stories about Pinta. “Do you think it’s high enough to die on impact?”
He grabbed her elbow and tugged her back onto the wider path. “How’s life up north?” His voice was strained.
“Good. Dad does a radio show with the local station, and he really likes it. Baba usually helps with medical care and deathbed rites, but se’s also slated to help the greenhouses, come harvest.” She wobbled on an unsteady ledge, pausing to regain her balance. The pavement below turned to gravelly beaches and then to murky water as she narrowed down what Dominik might find interesting about her old life. “My friend Murphy puts on these puppet musicals about marine biology, and the kids really love it.” She liked them too, secretly — where a lot of the Kawehno:ke’s entertainment was presented entirely in Kanien’kéha, Murphy’s scripts were fluidly bilingual and much easier to parse. Spending an afternoon being thoroughly baffled with a cute play was leagues better than sitting alone and drilling grammar and vocabulary until she cried. “I have other friends, but Murphy’s clanless, too — her mother is Siksika, from Mohkinstsis — and she helped me a lot when I was struggling.”
“So, why’d you leave?”
“I couldn’t get by.” Not when she could barely speak the language, not when she would never have the ease of belonging that her parents had, not when she would always be watching from a distance while her daughter navigated their world without her. But she was being too honest, especially for what Goose had said to her, and she scrambled for a falsehood that was safer than the truth. “I’m terrible at euchre, and it’s much simpler to live someplace where the weather is always the same — it changes hourly up north, and it’s a real pain in the ass.”
He snorted. “Yeah, sounds like absolute torture.”
She cringed in embarrassment and reached for something else to say about her friends. “Emilio is a wood-worker, and Tomazh sews; they fix up a lot of the kids in Kawehno:ke with clothes and toys. They took off about three months before I did: Emilio's cousin got a hold of some extra tickets, so they're taking a shot at the ship launching out of the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, and Murphy was about to move in with her main squeeze when I left, and I don't think I've ever met two people with more satisfaction in life. It's almost unbearable.”
“And what about you?”
The question took her by surprise, and she scrambled to cover up her sudden pause with a joke. “Why would I move in with Murphy and Logan?”
"Are you satisfied? Are you happy?"
"Satisfied enough."
He touched her elbow, prompting her to stop. “The last time I saw you, you were wasting away.”
She tugged her arm away and kept walking. “Make your point, Dominik.”
“Do you still think it was your fault?”
“No,” she said, too quickly. “I’m not abstaining to punish myself. I wanted to be a mother, I didn’t want to be a wife — I’m absolutely fine with the way things are.”
“You deserve to be more than ‘fine,’ Mal. She shouldn’t get to hold you hostage like this, not when she didn’t want you like you wanted her.”
She rolled her eyes, resisting the urge to touch the frames sitting on her head — Gwenh had never said it out loud, and so everyone had always thought Mal too naive to know that she was never interested, that Mal was once again giving away her love in bucketfuls that she’d never get back. Let them think her naive, she had decided long ago. Let them think her stupid and hopelessly devoted to an unrequited love nine years gone — the truth, that she had tried to steer her devotion in a new direction and failed, was far more excruciating. She had tried to move on from Gwenh when she met Maeve, a woman with hair more carrot-toned than auburn, with eyes that were blue and not brown, with an accent strongly of the Maritimes rather than Wales. She had finally accepted that Gwenh was gone, that she wasn’t going to suddenly reappear on her doorstep, and she had tried to imagine a future of marriage and happiness and children with someone else. Evidently, she had imagined it so well that she hadn’t noticed the infidelity until it was staring her in the face.
She remembered that day in snapshots. Opening the bedroom door to find Maeve in the act with someone else, hearing her calls to wait as she turned on her heel and left; sitting on the pier attached to her parent's isolated home, ignoring all attempts at conversation; finally returning late that night, hoping to clear out her belongings and avoid the messy implosion with a note. From there, the memories joined together into a movie reel: she found Maeve sitting at the table with her hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, her eyes red and cheeks stained with tears. Mal changed course and headed to the kettle for a cup of tea, but Maeve couldn’t even allow her that — Maeve was always asking for more than Mal could give.
“Don’t you have anything to say?”
“I will, in ten minutes.”
“No, no stalling — we’re getting this over with, right now.”
She sighed, turning away from the stove. “What is there to talk about, Maeve? You were fucking someone else.” She didn’t remember feeling as hurt as she should have been — it was as though she was witnessing a stranger’s relationship crumble, not her own.
“You don’t want to know why I did it?”
Mal shrugged. “Why did you do it?”
She looked taken aback, eyes welling up with more tears. “I— I—“
Mal looked away; she had never been able to handle people crying. “Spit it out, Maeve.”
She felt more tired than betrayed, and by the change in Maeve’s face it was clear in her tone, too. “I felt unloved,” she offered softly. Her fingernails picked at the loose threads on her sweater. “I did it because I feel like there’s always something blocking the way between us.” She scoffed and looked away, fingers falling still. “Or someone, rather.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then who do you picture, when you kiss me?” she asked sharply. “I’ve seen the pictures you have of her — I know we look alike, I know half the clothes you wear are hers. How can you blame me for messing around, when you’d rather be with a dead girl?”
As justified as Mal had felt in storming out and speaking ill of Maeve for years after, the question wasn’t without merit. When the height of betrayal had destroyed everything and her only reaction was the stand there and wonder why someone else’s baggage was sitting at her feet, things had abruptly become clear: Gwenh would come first every time, and it wasn’t fair to make someone else try to measure up.
They had covered some ground while she was lost in thought: they were past the river and only ten minutes from Port Newark. She could see the blurry shapes of razor-wire fences in the distance, the rest of the compound stuck in a near-constant gloom as day descended into night. Before long, they were at the base of the ten-foot fence.
Dominik stepped closer, ear cocked to listen for the hum of electricity, voice a low whisper, “I could boost you up, if you use your blanket to roll over the barbs—“
“Not a chance. Do you have any idea how valuable this yarn is?”
“Then what’s the plan?”
She reached into her pocket, rubbing her thumb against the smooth metal casing within. She knew she was stalling — breaking into Port Newark was once far more dangerous than traipsing through a war zone, or coming too close to Niña, or even walking up to a cop and spitting on their shoes. People caught breaking in weren’t taken away to be held for ransom in a Midtown prison; if she had been caught trespassing back then, she would have been shot where she stood. If she was very lucky, they might have paused to first offer her a blindfold and a last cigarette.
But Willow wouldn't be sending Dominik in, if it was really that dangerous. The last time she had been at this fence, the place was heavily guarded — now, it was eerily silent. She pulled the necklace from her pocket and, after a moment’s hesitation, pulled it over her head. The corkscrew bullet settled heavily over her chest as she tucked it under her shirt, her thoughts repeating like a mantra as she pulled out a pair of wire-cutters: don’t get caught, don’t get caught, don’t make Clover an orphan.
Once cut, the chain gave way easily. Dominik’s posture turned hunched as he entered enemy territory, leading the way to Bay 8. She walked in his footsteps to avoid disturbing loose gravel, close enough that Dominik didn’t have to speak over a mutter, “Stay close — we only split up if we have to run.”
Her shoulders stiffened, and she shook her head. “We should stick together. Safety in numbers.”
He motioned for her to stay back and paused at the corner of a crate, ear trained to the sound of guards patrolling three lanes down and waiting for them to pass. “Splitting up will divide their resources,” he whispered. “Less people to take down, if you get cornered — and at least one of us will have a good chance of getting away.”
She shuddered, and told herself it wouldn’t come to that. “Agree to disagree.”
The shipping container Tai-Song had mentioned was empty, its doors swinging open on rusted hinges. She beat her flashlight against her palm as it began to flicker, shaking the batteries down for an extra bit of light, but even then she could find no clues as to whether Tai-Song had even managed to get here. She resisted the urge to throw her flashlight on the ground, angrily kicking the door on her way out; Dominik hissed at her to be quiet as he flipped through the manifest copy, skimming through the contents with intense focus. She turned away with a huff, finding no comfort in pacing when she had to be silent.
After a seething three-and-a-half minutes, she finally turned on her heel and hissed, “We should come back tomorrow.”
“No way.” He didn’t even look up as he spoke, still flipping through the manifest. “They might see the door you made, tighten security — this is the best window we’ve got.”
“That window is done! Would you really rather risk getting killed here and now?” She kept thinking of Clover, and had to bite down on her cheek to distract herself. “What, you think he’s been hiding in a shipping container all this time?”
He finally looked up, an expression of hurt flitting across his face. “You agreed to help.”
“I know.” She was starting to regret ever doing so.
“He might have left a clue behind — we have to keep looking.”
“Well, I don’t want to!” The day was getting to her, making her shaky and temperamental, and she only just remembered to control the volume of her voice. “I don’t have time to go looking for him every time he does something stupid! I don’t know where else he could be, and I have a baby to get home to!”
He raised his hand to calm her, looking around warily for danger. “I’m not trying to keep you from her. I’m sorry that it falls to you, but in two days you’ve come further than the rest of us combined. I don’t want to leave until we’re sure that there’s nothing left to see.” She could tell he was biting his lip by the way his eyes darted in thought. “Listen, you’re right — he’s not your responsibility. I’ll be okay if you need to go.”
Her fists creaked with how hard she was clenching her fingers, with how impossible it was to take the easy way out if it meant leaving him without back-up. “All this trouble, just to dump him?”
“Just to dump him,” he confirmed. “I’m very petty.”
She sighed, fists loosening, some of her panicked anger subsiding. “I’m going to wring his damn neck.”
“That’s the spirit.” He flipped back to the second page of the manifest, beckoning her over to take a look. “What’s a matrix?”
“It’s— I don’t know.” It sounded like a word Goose might use when reprogramming the drones. “It must be for Niña — maybe the AI?” She leaned closer, looking at the big red stamp in the corner that read OVERCHARGED, and the stolen item circled in red pen: there was only one unit in the entire shipment, and the invoice had it priced well in the billions. From the grainy abstract attached, the matrix was a palm-sized pyramid, legal property of Naloss Pharmaceuticals.
“That’s the biggest haul I’ve ever seen.” He was almost in awe as he flipped to the item’s individual manifest. “That's why we can't find him — he must be hiding out somewhere until the heat dies down.”
She raised her head to ask him why he thought Tai-Song would be stupid enough to steal something so risky, but the words died on her tongue. Flashlight beams were sweeping toward them from around the corner. “Go dark!” she hissed, too loudly: the beams swung their way, just missing them as they ducked behind the shadow of the freight car.
Boots were already stomping toward them, and she wrestled the flashlight from Dominik’s hand and threw it across the gap. Dominik turned and ran in the opposite direction, Mal directly on his heels: she still didn’t want to split up. She wanted to stay close and make sure they both made it out safely — but she could hear the guards approaching, and she trusted Dominik’s judgement. The most rational action was to split up and ensure one of them made it out.
She peeled away and headed for the southern fence. It wasn’t long before she had a tail, her pursuers calling to each other to split up and corral her. She hurled her flashlight down one lane and ducked through another, pressing herself flat against the backside of a freight car as a platoon stomped by. She was surrounded, but the door of the container was unlocked — she was halfway squeezed into an empty space behind a supply box when two voices came into earshot.
“Lost ‘em. Any luck on the south gate?”
“Nothing, too fast.”
She slipped her blanket off of her shoulders to get some relief from the unbearable heat, hands already dissembling her camera. She parcelled the pieces into their hiding places: the lens and bulb into the bottom of her satchel, the film into her hair as she twisted her braid into a bun and pinned it with a pencil, the body tucked under and behind her armpit. She pulled her blanket back over her shoulders, eyes adjusting enough to see half of the name on the supply box in front of her: N-A-L-O — Naloxone?
“Think they went this way?”
“I’m off the clock in ten minutes. I could not care less about which way they went.”
She took out her knife and, as silently as she could manage, sliced into the box. Trespassing to steal medicine would make her look more heroic, and if she had a thick enough layer of stolen drugs no one would think to look underneath for an illegal camera. Hopefully it wouldn’t be necessary, but she needed something to think about that wasn’t wondering whether Dominik was already dead.
“Got a light?”
“Only if you’ve got enough to share.”
Sweat was collecting around her mask, and the exhaust valve felt deafening to her ears. She quickly pulled the clasps free and let the snorkel fall — instead of being mildly pungent, however, the air seemed to coat the inside of her mouth and nose with grimy particulate. She clapped her hands over her face to keep herself from coughing, eyes watering at the foul taste, the way it tickled deep inside her nostrils and down her throat.
More footsteps approached, accompanied by an out-of-breath voice. “I lost mine — jumped the fence and into the bay. Just one.”
She was as good as caught. Untouchables never worked alone, and it wouldn't be long before they noticed that the freight door wasn't properly closed. She pulled her snorkel back on and let her glasses fall down over her eyes — they would make her look younger, more vulnerable.
There was a small, ominous click, soon lost beneath the sound of the canister landing at her feet. She curled in on herself to mask her eyes, not quite fast enough to shield her ears as the flash-bang ignited. Hands latched around her ankle and dragged her out into the open, wrapping like iron bands around her elbows as her knees slammed into the gravel. The area had been illuminated with blinding flood-lights, making her eyes water.
Through her double-blurred vision she could see someone with authority approaching, the guards naming him as 'Mister Render, sir'. He was tall and at a glance nonthreatening, with greying hair and a trim silhouette by choice, not by hunger. Like the guards waiting to execute her, he wore a snorkel that enclosed his entire face, a smooth plexiglass exterior sealed with rubber from hairline to chin. The gills, level with his cheekbones, gently dilated with his breath, dissipating every trace of fog from the glass. Each time the fog cleared, she could see the faintest glimpse of unnaturally pale teeth.
The cuffs around her wrists were cold and too tight, and the gun on the back of her head forced her to lean forward at a painful angle. Her bag passed through many hands before it came to rest in Render’s possession, and he let it fall to the ground once he found the stolen medicine. A tiny seed of hope bloomed in her chest.
“And what do you want with these?”
“My uncle is sick.” Her ears were starting to clear, but her own voice still felt faraway and tinny. “The clinic doesn’t have enough to go around.”
“So they sent you to steal it,” he mused, turning the box toward her. “Although I imagine they sent for real medicine — not this snake oil.”
She swallowed thickly. Now, with her glasses sliding uselessly down her mask and with better light to read by, she could see what the thick black lettering actually spelled: Naloss-brand injectable vitamins. She was going to die over less than an ounce of Vitamin E treatment.
“I need a job!” she blurted out — if it had saved Eliza, it might save her.
He raised an eyebrow. “Can’t say I have much use for thieves.”
“I need a job,” she repeated, forcing it through clenched teeth, not even convincing herself. “I’ll be good at whatever you have me do.” She couldn’t force herself to speak the magic words: I’ll give you war plans, squadron positions, anything you want. An outburst like that could cost more lives than her own, if she wasn’t careful.
“If you were so skilled, I wouldn’t have caught you.” He turned away. “Search her, take back whatever else she might have stolen, and deal with her how you see fit.”
“Give me a job!” Panic laced through her as she lurched away from the hands knotting in her blanket, panic blocking everything else out. “Don’t touch me!”
Her right shoulder slammed into the ground, and the hands at her neck were clammy as they latched around the camera strap. “What’s this?” the guard said, wrestling the strap over her head, knocking her glasses off of her face. Her heart hammered as they held the camera aloft, like a prized fish. “Trespassing, theft, and possession of tools of treason — Collins will have a fit.”
“Wait.” Render had turned back, holding out his hand. “Give that to me.” No one made a sound as he inspected the contraband, eager to see what he would say; Mal’s heart began to pick up again as he turned it over in his hands, careful not to touch the delicate insides. He glanced at her with narrowed eyes, and the guards pulled her back upright. “Where did you get this?”
“Sir, if she’s like the last one—“
“Was I speaking to you, Barton?” He crouched down and picked up her glasses, placing them back on her nose. She welcomed the blur that masqueraded the finer points of his face as he held up the camera with green-laden fingers. “This is useless without a lens. What’s the idea in carrying it around?”
“It’s a toy — it doesn't work.” She could barely force out her answer between panicked breaths, eyes darting to her bag.
“Are you a child?” He absently tapped the camera’s body with one fingernail, a dull click-click-click. “Where did you find it?”
“My dad gave it me — it’s just a toy.”
“What a little liar you are.” He straightened up, going back for the bag and turning it out onto the gravel. Her heart stopped as he unearthed the bundled lens, all her amassed trinkets, and a photo she had forgotten about: her parents dancing, wreathed together in the golden halo left behind by the cracked lens. His eyes narrowed in blithe confusion as his thumb traced the odd light, like he’d finally found his answer to a question asked long ago. He picked up the lens and reattached it to the camera with practised ease, staring at the cracked glass with incongruent reverence. “Cut her loose,” he quietly ordered.
“Sir—“
“Do as I say. Whatever else she may have stolen will be found in time.” He knelt down, sweeping her things back into her bag and gingerly handing it back to her. She grabbed it from his hands and held it close to her chest, watching despairingly as he straightened up and gestured for her to follow. “Our chariot awaits, Miss Y.”